I do love this little pearl: > In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry

I do love this little pearl: > In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work. He's right, it used to be that I could jump from machine to machine in a Unix environment and really the only thing I gave a shit about locally was my login shell. (I started out using Irix in an SGI/AFS environment, so our logins were essentially stateless; since openGL/XGL worked over the wire, I ran demos in DC on hardware in NY just because, and it was fucking great). I was sad when the majority of businesses and individuals seemingly decided that Microsoft's single-user desktop worldview was preferable to the Bold Old World of Unix and Plan9, which at that point, thanks to things like XGL and the Andrew File System, was quite multi-user and network-centric. This is why Pike's little pearl speaks to me. The cloud was a good idea 20 years ago, too. But only recently has it become the focus it should have been, and in a way that isn't quite as satisfying as MIT and CMU were attempting in the 90s. It really was a spectacular time. VR in research labs was, then, ahead of where it is, now, in most respects; certainly for things like molecular dynamics, we viewed it as a given that you'd want to wander around and poke the computed empirical force field for a molecule. I guess the up side is that it should be a lot faster and easier to catch up given the ubiquitous and powerful CPUs of today -- a Raspberry Pi is more powerful than my old SGI Indigo ever was. Just a matter of will and intent if society wants to recover and surpass the progress we made back when, and democratize it much further than it was.